The inventive concept described herein relates to a semiconductor memory, and more particularly, relates to a nonvolatile memory module and an operating method thereof.
A semiconductor memory refers to a memory device that is implemented using a semiconductor material such as silicon (Si), germanium (Ge), gallium arsenide (GaAs), indium phosphide (InP), or the like. Semiconductor memory devices are generally divided into two types including a volatile memory device and a nonvolatile memory device.
As a type of nonvolatile memory device, a flash memory is widely used as a storage device in view of advantages such as large capacity, low noise, low power, and the like. In particular, a solid state drive (SSD) which is based on a flash memory is used as mass storage in a personal computer, a notebook, a workstation, a server system, and the like. Typical SSD devices are connected with a computing system based on a Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (Serial ATA or SATA) interface or a Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCI-express) interface. However, as the amount of data processed on a computing system increases, data throughput becomes greater than the data bandwidth or communication speed of an interface connected with the SSD devices, thereby causing a data bottleneck. Since the data bottleneck causes a decrease in the performance of the computing system, various techniques are being developed to improve the performance.